The answer to true love can be found in your spit. At least that's
what a new site called GenePartner.com claims. For $199, the Swiss
company promises to hook you up with your perfect mate using a sample
of your DNA. The site says "love is no coincidence," and that genetic
compatibility between you and your partner creates a better sex life, a
higher fertility rate and healthier children.

The service,
which launched this month, was inspired by a study at the University of
Bern, Switzerland, where female volunteers sniffed men's T-shirts and
rated them for attractiveness. The study found that women were most
attracted to the scent of men whose HLA (human leukocyte antigen)
molecules were most different from their own. Research has shown that
we prefer mates with different HLA genes because it helps to produce
offspring with stronger immune systems.

GenePartner.com
simplifies the process by analyzing saliva samples to produce unique ID
numbers based on customers' DNA. The numbers for two partners can then
be plugged into an online algorithm system for a compatibility reading.

Tamara Brown, managing director of GenePartner, says that rather
than building its own dating site, her company will partner with
existing sites that could let customers include GenePartner ID numbers
in their profiles. "The goal is to make it complementary to dating
sites," she says.

So far, the company, which launched with
US$500,000 in seed money from investors, has been approached by two
major dating sites. In the first nine days of operation, it signed up
more than 270 customers.

Nate Elliott, an online marketing analyst at Jupiter
Research, says the US$750 million online dating industry is showing
signs of saturation when it comes to new users, so sites will need to
extract more money from existing customers. Unique services, such as
the one offered by GenePartner, could help them do that. "As a
marketing tool it should get some attention," he says. "But to survive
they'll need big partners."

So, hooked up to an IV drip for my screwed up immune system, it seemed fitting to follow up on this story. I can't say I'm a huge fan of online dating, but it sure would be nice to find a stud who could provide me with a child who doesn't has to suffer from a weak immune system.

While the Western world prepares to re-engineer the traditional mating practice of swapping spit to breed best-brand-babies, the East is also modernizing spitting traditions.

"It's good to spit, it's good for your health," said the
40-year-old man unapologetically as he rubs his shoe over the foul
puddle he has just created.

Although there is now a wide consensus that spitting is
"uncivilised" behavior, as pre-Olympics manners campaigns term it,
spitting is still pretty much a trademark sight and sound across
the country.

Even though the government has stepped up punishment for
spitting, a possible fine of 50 yuan ($A8) does not deter Guo.

"That's okay - most of the time, they don't see you," he
said.

Few who visit China can help but notice the frequency of
spitting in public, which often follows a irritatingly gravelly
clearing of the throat and lungs, and a complete lack of
embarrassment about the habit.

Late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was a known to be an
enthusiastic spitter who proudly kept a spittoon close by when he
greeted foreign dignitaries at the Great Hall of the People in the
1970s and 1980s.

Although the practice spreads diseases that are rife in China,
it is still common on the roads and alleys of the Chinese capital
to have to dodge disgusting blobs of saliva - especially in winter
when they freeze and become hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists
alike.

But to many Chinese, spitting is a physical phenomenon as
natural as sneezing or belching, and is traditionally nothing to be
ashamed of.

"Well, I can't spit inside my car, can I?" said taxi driver Sui
Ningguo, as he wound down the window and propelled his phlegm
outwards. "No one cares about spitting anyway."

Medical experts say phlegm is generated normally when one is
suffering from respiratory infections, but it is also produced when
the lungs are irritated by pollution and habits such as smoking and
eating heavy, oily food.

"Dry climate in many Chinese cities, coupled with bad air
quality, also lead to the build-up of mucus in one's respiratory
tract, hence generating phlegm," she said.

She said air-borne respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis,
pneumonia and influenza can be spread by the phlegm of a disease
carrier.

Doctors say the urge to spit is probably more to do with the
commonly perceived concept in China that one should spit whenever
one feels a throat irritation.

"A lot of it is just bad habit. Some people spit even when there
is no phlegm and what they spit out is in fact saliva," said Wang
Jidong, professor at the Beijing Chinese Medicine University.

"But saliva is part of your normal secretion and aids digestion.
It's just a wrong idea that people have."

Earlier this year, officials admitted that getting the capital's
residents to bring their manners up to international standard in
time for the Olympics next August could be a bigger task than
constructing the new sports venues.

Zhang Faqiang, vice head of the Beijing Olympic organising
committee, said the most difficult area in staging a "civilised"
Olympics" rests in "the quality of the people".

But some ordinary Beijing residents say they really do not
care.

"As an individual, I can't care too much about the country's
affairs. To be honest, who cares?" said Guo, the bicycle
attendant.

It's telling that China has worked to promote itself as "civilized" right down to its spit. If it is in China's interests to promote itself as civilized, one must ask who benefits from damning China? While the Left is seizing the spotlight to illuminate the human rights abuses in China, it should reconsider if it wants to serve the Anglo-Empire with China-Bashing-Delite. Larry Chin writes,

Virtually
every government on the planet is guilty of human rights abuses, and
these abuses deserve to be exposed and protested. But to simplemindedly
(and, with more than a little racism thrown in) protest China, based on
human rights “causes” created, manipulated, and co-opted by
Anglo-American intelligence propaganda is to fall directly into the
hands of the exponentially greater violators of human rights all over
the world: the United States and its allies.

Indeed,
activists and protesters all over the world must ask themselves whose
side they are really on, and to whose orders are they marching? The
vast majority of both pro- and anti-Chinese protesters fail to
acknowledge the complexities underlying their pet causes, or the
corruption poisoning the situation from every side.

Far from
actually alleviating any suffering in Darfur, Tibet or within China
itself, activists are being guided into deepening the suffering;
assisting the Anglo-American empire’s own plans to destabilize and
conquer (energy-rich and strategically situated) Africa and
(energy-rich and strategically situated) Tibet, and politically hamper
Beijing.

China is the target of long-term US military and political aggression.
A full-blown superpower conflict is underway. China is being
simultaneously used as the labor engine for the world’s capitalist
economy, while being geostrategically and militarily encircled. China
is also in the process of being financially seized and gutted by the
World Trade Organization. Every move made by the Beijing government,
particularly for its own stakes in oil and gas, have been violently
contested by the Western powers.

China’s
attempted rise to the world stage, out of decades of isolation, is
headed off by rapacious US-led machinations. Today’s anti-Chinese
Olympics protests are simply the latest manifestation.

It is no
surprise that US presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama have jumped on the anti-Chinese Olympic boycott bandwagon,
joining the worldwide anti-China propaganda noise. It is now
politically expedient for all of the presidential nominees, as well as
the Bush-Cheney administration, to hammer at Beijing, without bothering
to mention the true complexities of US-China politics.

It is
tragically ironic that the predominantly Western/developed market-based
“Save Tibet” and “Save Darfur” activists and anti-China protesters have
done relatively little, if anything to “save themselves.”

Compared to
the militant zeal expended against China, relatively little passion or
outrage has been aimed at the Bush-Cheney administration. These
“activists” would rather focus on “saving those poor Tibetans and
Africans,” even as their own human rights, liberties, material assets
and well being have been systematically ripped away, by an openly
criminal administration that (with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court,
Congress, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, etc.) enjoys absolute
unchecked power.

The “Save
Tibet,” “Save Darfur,” and “Help Falun Gong” movements are as deceptive
as the “war on terrorism.” The “causes” are controlled by
Anglo-American intelligence apparatuses and/or co-opted by them, in
order to provide the masses with the propaganda justification for wars
and intervention, and resource conquest.

So, that concludes today's discussion of spit: the answer to true love and covert weapon of the American Empire.

The largest raid on a single workplace in U.S. history occurred last Wednesday, May 12, in Iowa where hundreds of workers were arrested and then hauled off to a
makeshift detention center at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds. Nicole Carlson reports,

In a massive, coordinated effort, witnesses say more than 100 agents
from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stormed
into the AgriProcessors Inc. complex in the small town of Postville, at
10 a.m. As government helicopters flew overhead, workers were ordered
to stand in two groups--those with identification to the right, and
those with other papers to the left.

"There was plenty of hollering," Chuck Larson, a truck driver at the plant, told the Des Moines Register.
"You couldn't go anywhere." When the paper asked Larson who was
separated out, he said that those standing in the group of people with
"other" papers were all Latino.

One detainee, who was facing deportation and wished to remain anonymous, told the Register that several weeks ago, she was told by officials at the plants to make her "papers" look more realistic.

As the raid began, she said, a call came over the loudspeaker,
announcing that ICE was in the plant. Workers throughout the plant
tried to hide or run away. "Everyone scampered, everyone tried to get
away," she said. "Once they knew they couldn't get away, they came down
from their hiding places."

Now, the woman said, she's worried she won't be able to send money to her children in Guatemala.

After those without ID were separated out, they were frisked and
told to remove any sweaters or heavy garments. Then their wrists were
handcuffed, chains were attached to their waists and their feet were
cuffed, before they were put on buses for Waterloo, Iowa--to the
National Cattle Congress fairgrounds, which federal authorities had
leased in advance of the raid in early May for what they told the media
would be a "training exercise." Activists now say the grounds are being
used as a makeshift processing and detention center.

...

Of those detained so far, authorities say the vast majority are
Latino--290 are Guatemalan and more than 90 are Mexican. Federal
officials claim that as many as three-quarters of the plant's
1,000-strong workforce are using fraudulent Social Security numbers.

POSTVILLE IS a small town of around 2,500 people. Approximately
1,000 people--mainly immigrants from surrounding communities--work at
the AgriProcessors plant, which is the largest kosher slaughterhouse in
the U.S. and one of the biggest employers in the state.

The plant was opened in 1987 by members of a local ultra-Orthodox
Hasidic community. There is a reported history of tensions between the
Jewish community and the town (including some open anti-Semitism which
helped lead to a 1997 referendum allowing the town to annex the land
that the slaughterhouse was on).

Today, labor activists and others say the plant has a long record of
abuses that includes substandard pay, poor working conditions and other
violations.

For its part, AgriProcessors claims to be a wonderful employer. In a
letter on its Web site in November, the company denounced the United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union--which has tried
unsuccessfully to organize the plant--for supposedly "'waging economic
war on an unorganized company'...

"As part and parcel of this campaign, the UFCW has disseminated
inaccurate and false information, which is designed to destroy
AgriProcessors, Inc.'s image and inflict economic damage."

According to the UFCW, however, it is AgriProcessors that inflicts damage--on its workers.

A June article posted on the UFCW Local 1776 Web site said
AgriProcessors not only engaged in inhumane slaughtering practices
(covered up, according to a USDA Inspector General's report, by "gifts"
to federal Food Safety Inspection Service meat inspectors), but a wide
range of abuses against its largely immigrant workforce.

According to the UFCW, "The Forward, published in New York
City, has documented the substandard working conditions at the
AgriProcessors plant in Postville. Workers receive little or no
required safety training and have suffered amputations and other
serious injuries on the job. Health and safety provisions are lacking.
In 2006, the company accounted for more than half of the slaughterhouse
complaints submitted to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health
Administration from the entire state of Iowa.

"The workers at AgriProcessors are among the lowest-paid in the
industry. They do not receive proper overtime pay or adequate health
care benefits. They are threatened with dismissal if they complain or
speak to outsiders. And they are extorted for cash or asked to buy cars
from supervisors when they apply for a job.

"Supervisors at AgriProcessors spy on workers who meet with visitors
to Postville. They trail people who investigate the company. And they
give workers flyers warning them not to talk to outsiders or 'the union
devils.' The workers' rights to organize are strongly discouraged and
compromised."

...

RATHER THAN protect the rights of these vulnerable workers, however,
federal authorities seem to have used the allegations of workplace
abuse as an excuse to justify the raid.

In the warrant allowing the raid, officials described an incident in
which a supervisor covered the eyes of an employee with duct tape and
struck him with a meat hook. According to the Register, "The worker...declined to report the incident for fear of losing his job, the warrant said."

Another worker allegedly told federal officials that undocumented
workers were paid just $5 an hour for their first few months of work,
before receiving a raise to $6 an hour--well under Iowa's legal minimum
wage of $7.25.

That these allegations could be used as a pretense to round up and
potentially deport hundreds of workers, rather than crack down on
workplace abuses--in an industry that is notorious for such
practices--shows how far the federal government will sink in
scapegoating immigrants.

As David Goodner, an activist with the University of Iowa Campus Antiwar Network, pointed out on his blog at the Des Moines Register,
"Guatemala is one of the most impoverished countries in the Western
Hemisphere and has been a survivor of economic and military rape by the
United States for decades. Free trade agreements like NAFTA
overwhelmingly benefit multinational corporations at the expense of
ordinary, everyday workers across the world.

"If capital knows no nationality and can move across borders in
search of profit, then the workers of the world also have every right
to move across borders in search of livable wages and dignified work."

For now, the raid in Postville has created a wave of fear in the immigrant community in the area.

Anna Lopez, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said many Latinos in
Waterloo were scared of appearing in public for fear of being seized by
ICE. "They're under the bed hiding," she told the Register.

"I am afraid there's nothing I can do," said Kim Berger, who waited
outside the Cattle Congress grounds after the raid for information
about family members and friends.

But in an inspiring demonstration of support, as many as 200
protesters--including many high school students--turned out late Monday
at the gates of the fairgrounds to demand the release of the detainees.
They chanted, "ICE go home," "We are with you" and "We have rights,"
while waving signs that said, "Honk for Human Rights."

"We work hard, we stay out of trouble, and they want to take us away?" Cesar Bravo, a high school student, told the Waterloo Courier. "When they hit Tama (County) in a raid, they took my uncle. They ruin our families."

As student Veronica Retuer-Villagrana added, "We come here to work, not be criminals."

Marc Cooper wrote on the collusion between INS and the meatpacking industry in Iowa as early as 1997 (for The Nation). In 'The Heartland's Raw Deal: How Meatpacking is Creating an Immigrant Underclass', Cooper quotes a worker in Storm Lake, Iowa:

Everyone knows that the company and the INS are in together on all of this. They never make a company pay a fine, do they? Everyone knows they are never going to arrest all of us. Who would do this shitty work for them? We know that every now and then the migra will come in and take a few away to keep the politicians happy. And then we won't see them again for another two years. That's how it works.

While the cooperation between cooperations and states is obvious to immigrant workers, it seems that the implications of coercive immigration mechanisms have not yet permeated the popular consciousness of so-called citizen workers. As many immigration scholars and activists have pointed out, immigration policies are more crucial for bolstering the interests of corporations by restricting rights within boundaries than for restricting movement across them.